IAPP Canada Privacy Symposium 2023

Anil Arora was appointed chief statistician of Canada in September 2016. Mr. Arora has led significant transformational initiatives throughout his career, with experience and partnerships spanning all three levels of government, the private sector and international organizations, including the UN and the OECD. He has led projects on high-profile policy issues, legislative and regulatory reform, and overseen large national programs.

In 1988, Mr. Arora joined Statistics Canada where he served in several positions, including regional operations, corporate services and the redesign of the dissemination function. In 2000, he became director of Census Management Office and subsequently the director general responsible for all aspects of the 2006 census. In this role, Mr. Arora led the most comprehensive redesign of the program, including the introduction of an online questionnaire. Following the successful delivery of the 2006 census he became the assistant chief statistician of Social, Health and Labour Statistics from 2008 to 2010.

In 2009, Mr. Arora received the prestigious APEX Leadership Award in recognition of his exceptional leadership skills and management excellence.

In 2010, Mr. Arora joined Natural Resources Canada as assistant deputy minister of the Minerals and Metals Sector, and in 2013 was appointed assistant deputy minister of Science and Policy Integration. He moved to Health Canada in 2014, becoming assistant deputy minister of Health Products and Food Branch and leading a complex organization overseeing regulation of food, drug and health products for Canada. He also served as chair of the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities.

Mr. Arora attended the University of Alberta, where he earned a Bachelor of Science, followed by further education in computing science and management, including a graduate certificate in Advanced Public Sector Management at the University of Ottawa, and the Advanced Leadership Program at the Canada School of Public Service. He was named top 25 immigrants in Canada in 2022 and is a sought-after speaker and thought leader.

Mr. Arora is the chair of the OECD committee on statistics and statistical policy, vice chair of the bureau for the conference of European Statisticians, and the chair of the High-Level Group on the modernization of official statistics.

Chantal Bernier joined the Privacy and Cybersecurity practice of Dentons Canada LLP in 2014. She came to Dentons after nearly six years leading the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) as interim privacy commissioner and as assistant privacy commissioner. She oversaw the operations of the OPC, including national and international privacy investigations in the public and private sectors, privacy audits, privacy impact assessment reviews as well as technological analysis, privacy policy development and research.

Prior to leading the OPC, Chantal worked at senior levels of the Government of Canada, including as assistant deputy minister responsible for Socio-Economic Development at Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Canada, as assistant deputy minister responsible for Community Safety and Partnerships at Public Safety Canada, and as director of operations for the Machinery of Government Secretariat of the Privy Council Office. Chantal also negotiated international conventions for Canada as part of the International and Constitutional Law Section of the Department of Justice.

Chantal’s insight as a former privacy regulator, as well as her experience as a senior executive, uniquely positions her to understand corporate management challenges and find solutions to serve corporate interests and comply with the law.

Philippe Dufresne was appointed privacy commissioner of Canada on June 27, 2022. A leading legal expert on human rights, administrative and constitutional law, he previously served as the law clerk and parliamentary counsel of the House of Commons. In this capacity, he was the chief legal officer of the House of Commons and led the office responsible for the provision of legal and legislative drafting services to the House of Commons, its speaker, members and committees, the Board of Internal Economy and the House Administration.

Prior to his appointment as law clerk of the House of Commons in 2015, he was the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s senior general counsel, responsible for legal services, litigation, investigations, mediations, employment equity and access to information and privacy. During that time, he successfully represented the commission before all levels of Canadian courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada, in a number of key human rights and constitutional cases over the last two decades. He has appeared before the Supreme Court on 15 occasions, on issues ranging from accessibility and equal pay for work of equal value, to the balancing of human rights and national security. As lead counsel for the commission in the landmark parliamentary privilege case of House of Commons v. Vaid, he helped reinforce and clarify some of the country’s fundamental constitutional principles as they apply to the House of Commons and Parliament.

A member of the bars of Québec, Ontario and Massachusetts, he has served his profession and community in several different capacities, including as president of the constitutional and human rights law section of the Canadian Bar Association (Québec Branch) and as a member of the editorial board for the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association’s CCCA Magazine. In 2014, he served as president of the International Commission of Jurists, an organization devoted to the protection of the rule of law and judicial independence in Canada and internationally.

Commissioner Dufresne holds degrees in common and civil law from McGill University’s Faculty of Law, and has been a part-time professor with the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Common Law and Queen’s University’s Faculty of Law where he taught international criminal law, human rights and appellate advocacy. He regularly speaks on issues of human rights, administrative, constitutional and parliamentary law in Canada.

Dr. Khaled El Emam is the Canada research chair (Tier 1) in Medical AI at the University of Ottawa, where he is a professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health. He is also a senior scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and director of the multi-disciplinary Electronic Health Information Laboratory, conducting research on privacy enhancing technologies to enable the sharing of health data for secondary purposes, including synthetic data generation and de-identification methods.

Khaled is a co-founder of Replica Analytics, a company that develops synthetic data generation technology, which was recently acquired by Aetion. As an entrepreneur, Khaled founded or co-founded six product and services companies involved with data management and data analytics, with some having successful exits. Prior to his academic roles, he was a senior research officer at the National Research Council of Canada. He also served as the head of the Quantitative Methods Group at the Fraunhofer Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany.

He participates in a number of committees, the European Medicines Agency Technical Anonymization Group, the Panel on Research Ethics advising on the TCPS, the Strategic Advisory Council of the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and also is co-editor-in-chief of the JMIR AI journal.

In 2003 and 2004, he was ranked as the top systems and software engineering scholar worldwide by the Journal of Systems and Software based on his research on measurement and quality evaluation and improvement. He held the Canada research chair in Electronic Health Information at the University of Ottawa from 2005 to 2015. Khaled has a PhD from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, King’s College, at the University of London, England.

Sue Gardner’s work is motivated by the desire to ensure that everybody in the world has access to the information they want and need, so they’re equipped to make the best-possible decisions about their lives. Sue spent the first decade of her career as a journalist, working in radio, TV, print and online. In 2003 she became head of CBC.CA, the website of one of Canada’s best-loved cultural institutions, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2007 Sue became executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, the world’s largest and most popular encyclopedia. Today she serves as an advisor or board member for a variety of non-profit, grant-making and policy organizations, mostly related to technology, media, gender and digital freedoms.

Sue has an honorary doctorate of laws from Ryerson University, was named a Technology Pioneer for the World Economic Forum at Davos, has been ranked by Forbes magazine as the world’s 70th most powerful woman, was the inaugural recipient of the Knight Foundation’s Innovation Award, received the Cultural Humanist of the Year award from the Harvard Humanist Association, and is a proud recipient of the Nyan Cat Medal of Internet Awesomeness for Defending Internet Freedom.

Patricia Kosseim brings to her role as commissioner significant experience and a wealth of knowledge in the areas of privacy and access law, having worked in public, private and health sectors, and across various jurisdictions.

Previously, Patricia was counsel in Osler's Privacy and Data Management Group and served for more than a decade as senior general counsel and director general at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

She has held executive positions at Genome Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and has taught part time at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.

Patricia obtained her business and law degrees from McGill University, and a Master’s Degree in Medical Law and Ethics from King’s College, University of London, UK.

Patricia is a member of the Law Society of Ontario and the Barreau du Quebec, and is fluently bilingual in English and French.

Kristen Thomasen earned her Juris Doctor degree at the University of Ottawa and holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) in Anthropology from McMaster University and Master of Arts in International Affairs from Carleton University. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy in Law at the University of Ottawa, where her dissertation focused on public space privacy intrusions facilitated by robots and artificial intelligence (e.g., drones, facial recognition technology). Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she served as law clerk to the Honourable Madam Justice Rosalie Abella at the Supreme Court of Canada and clerked for the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench, as well as articling for Alberta Justice.

Thomasen has published her research in several articles and book chapters, most recently a piece on “Robots, Regulation, and the Changing Nature of Public Space” in the Ottawa Law Review. She is a regular public commentator in the mainstream media and other channels, and serves on the Legal Expertise Committee of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, as well as the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. At Windsor Law, she taught in the areas of privacy law, torts, and robotics law and policy. At Allard Law, she teaches "Special Topics in Law and Technology: Law, Robotics, and Society."